Well we’ve pointed at the hole in the wall where the burglar kicked the door in for a little while, we’ve group-hugged and we’ve had a long chat in Starbucks about what happens next in this cruel post-robbery world.

The good news, a rare event in this sorry saga, is that our last online back-up wasn’t *quite* as long ago as we had first feared. The loss of the laptops is still a major kick in the balls, and the recovery time will still be significant in terms of the next update, but it’s certainly a better situation than what could have been.

In order to speed up the process of getting the updates out to our community we’ve decided to concentrate on what has been partly retained (namely NPCs and NPC behaviour) for our next release. We’re afraid that the save-on-quit function, the ability to move from map to map and the new map itself will have to follow in a subsequent update. We intend to pepper the NPC update with a few fun recipes and new items to compensate or, at least, compensate as much as we can. As ever, we don’t want to put a timescale on this – just please rest assured that we will be working with all hands to the proverbial dev-pump.

In general you’ll also be seeing a lot more activity here on the blog – updating people on development progress, pointing out interesting projects that have caught our eye in the modding sections of the forum and, indeed, elsewhere on the internet. We’re also giving serious thought to getting a community manager on board, although it will clearly have to be the right candidate, and we’ll also have to talk more a bit more internally about the proposed role before discussing it further in public.

It’s been a very, very difficult weekend – and one that’s exposed us in our rawest and most human form. As such we’d also like to use this platform to thank members of the community for their patience, and for the messages of goodwill that we’ve received on forums, facebook and on email. We’ve learned an awful lot during this trauma, and won’t simply be sitting here licking our wounds.

The overall quality of Project Zomboid has not been compromised, in fact we’re now even more determined to create the game we’ve always dreamt of. For the time being, however, we’ll also be nailing a few extra barricades onto the PZ office door…